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The Heartland Institute Sends Legal Notices to Publishers of Faked and Stolen Documents

The Heartland Institute Sends Legal Notices to Publishers of Faked and Stolen Documents (2012-02-19). Anthony Watts thinks the Heartland Institute is kickin’ butt and takin’ names. They’re absolutely insisting that Desmogblog.com take down those embarrassing Heartland documents, some of which might be fake, and delete everything they said about them. Of course being staunch defenders of every individual’s right to exploit others, the Heartland Institute has to preface this with a hypocritical bit of spin:

“We realize this will be portrayed by some as a heavy-handed threat to free speech.”

Watts will attack Glieck endlessly about this, but in the end the documents are out there, they are authentic, and the case will probably never go to court. Heartland’s bottom line will be to protect its donors, and pursuing a legal remedy means supoenaed documents and witnesses. Bast will go to great lengths to protect the name of the “Anonymous Donor,” and by going public, Glieck actually has an ace up his sleeve on the identify. Similarly, Heartland’s Board is probably busier negotiating a severage package with Bast that protects the name of the “Anonymous Donor” that following up on criminal charges. They know what they need to do to keep the money flowing.

One scribe, by the name of Shawn Lawrence, at the “Huffington Post”, did as Anthony requested, used JGAAP, with caveats applied. The results are rather interesting, as they exonerate Peter Gleick as the author of the alleged fake document, and implicate Joe Bast, instead. ; )

Got love that one, Anthony Watts ends up debunking himself with his own words.

Oops “Watta a mistake to maka”!

It probably explains, why the astroturfing by Heartlands assorted friends and questionable associates about “FakeGate’s Leaky ethics pot boiler” is now rapidly running out of steam, as the cynics start asking Joe “No proof equals no truth” !

This would go beyond simply clearing Peter Gleick of the hard-to-understand and therefore always unlikely accusation of forgery.

And even beyond Heartland’s lost innocence, lost respectability, and diminished victimhood vis a vis an evil warmist.

Without any diminishing of the impersonation offense, Peter Gleick retrieves some of his lost dependability. Heartland is no longer, to the uninitiated, just another think tank. And Peter Gleick’s malfeasance acquires a little bit of justification, against a deceitful opponent.

I set up a blog so I have somewhere to document all the errors I find in skeptic blogs. I won’t always be blogging about WUWT nor spending so much time on posts, but my first post is about how WUWT recently used the Hockey Stick (possibly without realizing it) to support their fantasies about the sun:

On the occasion of ‘skeptics’ getting their fans out to vote for their fave blog scientists in the ‘webbies’, I wrote this in another place. Thought I’d share…

And still the point at which Watts, McIntyre or Jo Nova come up with the killer case that wins the scientific debate remains in the future. There’s an asymmetry here – if these ‘skeptic’ blogs had to operate under the contraints of making a rigorous scientific case that stands up to scrutiny – would they be quite so popular? You know, correcting your mistakes, that kind of thing.

It is a ‘paper’ entitled ‘Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?’ coauthored by Watts. The first point in the exec summary is

“Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.”

Now Watts knows that this is not the case, in fact the Berkeley (BEST) project in which he is also a coauthor proved that this is false. A scientist corrects or retracts his conclusions once they have been falsified. Blog scientist Mr Watts, even though he has self-falsified, leaves his online to mislead. This is propaganda, not science. Imagine if RealClimate or the IPCC could do this?

Watts wants us to believe that this paper which found no trend in the Antarctic surface mass balance means the Antarctic is not losing ice…

“While Gore, Hansen, Branson, and a gaggle of hangers on just finished a publicity stunt tour of Antarctica to tell us all how terrible the ice loss is there, the data says otherwise. No trend!”

… not understanding that SMB already has a time element – so there was no trend in the trend. He also gloats:-

“Here’s the money quote:

[15] We found no significant trend in the 1979–2010 ice
sheet integrated SMB components, which confirms the
results from Monaghan et al. [2006]. The estimated SMB
trend, integrated over the ice sheet, equals 3+/-2 Gt/y^-2”

You’d think a ‘scientist’ would notice the units? He also mangles his ‘money quote’ – the sign of the trend in the paper is actually negative. Numerous people point out the howlers in the comments and that this paper is in line (actually slightly ‘worse’) with IPCC projections, but once again the headline is more important than the facts and the post goes uncorrected.

WUWT is lively, entertaining and appeals to a large number of people, and I congratulate Mr Watts in garnering votes. Just do not confuse him with a man of integrity, or his site with a reliable source of information.

You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Evidently, the volume of Anti-Gleick postings at WUWT has caught you flat-footed. Either that, or you are overwhelmed by the task of proving the truth to be lies. Good luck, either way.

It just struck me how “Disneyesque” catastrophic anthropogenic global warming actually is when you described ice as “not liking” warmer temperatures.

Making climate anthropogenic is just as fallacious and pernicious as Walt’s anthropomorphizing of animals and inanimate objects. Humans pursue all manner of folly because Fifi has feelings.

And as you know Ben, “Going to Disneyland” is probably more of a Canadian colloquialism than an American one. I sure hope we get out of the CAGW theme park soon. The kids are tired; the wife is grumpy, and our credit cards are maxed.

Just reading to the end of the piece makes it crystal that the reporter was talking in Farenheit. So Hansen’s prediction, if this secondary source is accurate, was out by about 0.5C over the period. But the post and graph exaggerate that by 80%. What are the chances of a correction, I wonder?

Incidentally, Dr Hansen went on to add that he “would like to understand the problem better before I order any dramatic actions” (source) which is not exacly the language of a shrill alarmist. We do now understand the problem better and Hansen’s view on what are the current appropriate actions are plain.

Remember that one time when Anthony blindly rubber-stamped that one rant by that one guy who didn’t really know wtf he was talking about, and all those people followed up with “GREAT POST” and then somebody pointed out how absurd the original post was, because it defied the constraints of physics or logic, and then that one post just kinda sank to the bottom of the page? Do you remember that? That was awesome.

Just been snipped by the ‘site that doesn’t censor’ in the hansen ‘beef’ thread. Ho hum.

Added this to Shollenberg’s ‘book review’. We’ll see if it gets posted:

Too many unsupported assertions and half truths to list in detail. Here’s just one example of rather selective quotation, from the NAS report:-

“As part of their statistical methods, Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions. ”

The next section being carefully ommitted:

“In practice, this method, though not recommended, does not appear to unduly influence reconstructions of hemispheric mean temperature; reconstructions performed without using principal component analysis are qualitatively similar to the original curves presented by Mann et al.”

So despite all the noise expended on it, the whole PCA question is moot, as indeed Wahl and Amman and and von Storch et al (2005) demonstrated.

Clearly, Mr Schollenberg is not being entirely candid with his readers.

Interestingly in a later post March 17th, 2012, at “WUWT” Ric Werme, is still desperately trying to support the long debunked canard of Steven Goddard, about the USSN Skate, allegedly surfacing in open water at the North Pole in the middle of winter maximum freeze( the photo was taken in August 1959 when the submarine was delivering supplies to Ice Station Alpha). The majority of comments in the post apart from the few silly ones who showed their complete ignorance of all things about the USS Albacore, referred to the book written by James Calvert, and first published in 1966 and reprinted 2010 or the actual funeral photo taken by James Calvert(J Bowers). This book showed the pictures in chronological order and the actual funeral photo taken in March 1958. In addition Ric, within the comments, whilst still trying to desperately defend his thoroughly debunked posting, he then claimed the photo was taken in August, 1958, not as it was taken in 1959, thus destroying his credibility in the process. Anthony Watts, claimed that the fault of misidentification of the photograph remains with Navsource archives and not his his pseudonym associate and man of only errors, in all things called climate and weather, Steven Goddard, whom he didn’t mention, as the original source of the deliberate misinformation. (priceless)

very quiet here, I hope this place doesn’t go the way of Denial Depot – all rat and tumble weed infested.

[If anything Anthony has sunk even lower, so there’s much that could be examined. But finding the same malicious lies day after day gets both boring and tiring. I hope I can find the amusement in it again! – Ben]

Come on Ben, you can’t seriously still maintain your position. Is that why you have not posted for ages? Where is the global warming? How much will it cost to mitigate 1 degree of warming over the next 50 years? What is the likely-hood that the warming would occur anyway? How much damage would that warming do?

Say Ben, you will be happy to know Anthony Watts, ever faithful denialati servants, have kicked their own goal with his post “NASA: Warm Ocean Currents Cause Majority of Ice Loss from Antarctica” on April, 25th, 2012. Reason, is their pure ignorance of hot and cold ocean currents or total lack of understanding of the properties of the “Thermohaline Circulation”. Many of the comments by the faithful including those by Willis E. are pure idiocracy and are priceless. Link.

In another post, he claims his sole ‘HBGary Spambot’ supposedly skewed the results twice, of an Australian Government TV Station recent program ” “I Can Change Your Mind about Climate”, which was broadcast at 8.30 pm on April 26th, 2012. Sadly, the sneaky Oz, TV station applied the magic of ip address and email country of origin filtering, to eliminate 99.99985% of his sole HBGary multiple 500K trash voting entries. Link.

Sadly, this show was not up to the usual Oz ABC TV high standards and was more closely aligned with the inferior Murdoch Faux Noose standards of unfair and unbalanced. The only saving grace in the entire show, was where the interview with Richard Muller, whose BEST results, totally ended up debunking the complete horse hockey nonsense of Heartland Institute’s paid informant in Oz, Joanne Nova and her husband. There was an interview with Marc Morano, who gish galloped his entire interview time.

Skeptical science : ABC documentary demonstrates the how and why of climate denial, included the critical missing interview with Naomi Oreskes, which would have been the turning point, there is no argument on the science of global warming: Link.

John Cook, from ‘Skeptical Science’ wrote an article in the ABC TV Environment, and a fair number of comments appear to have the mark of the usual denialati HBGary spambot. Link.

{The Conversation is a great website. Plenty of thoughtful ideas, well presented. Any TV “debate” is going to favor bluster, and that’s what happened on the ABC show. Anthony, unsurprisingly, continues to be a duplicitous loudmouth. – Ben}

I get it. This site is supposed to be a parody of the more famous, more popular and more visited website of Watts Up With That.

I see you are running out of material to criticize since the last post was 3 months ago. Do I hear crickets chirping?

[You get it huh? Anthony Watts is a dim-witted, lying, broken record. It’s kind of enjoyable to turn off the gramophone for a bit. You think his repetitious deception and fake criticism “wins” if it’s not immediately challenged? Good luck with that. – Ben]